Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Made to Stick

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas "stick". In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds draw their power from the same six traits.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy - instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us. Essentialism is not one more thing - it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

From Daniel H. Pink, the author of the groundbreaking best seller A Whole New Mind, comes his next big idea book: a paradigm-changing examination of what truly motivates us and how to harness that knowledge to find greater satisfaction in our lives and our work.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics - as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters - this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don't merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over? People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

For decades we've been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F*ck positivity," Mark Manson says. "Let's be honest, shit is f*cked, and we have to live with it." In his wildly popular Internet blog, Manson doesn't sugarcoat or equivocate. He tells it like it is - a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is his antidote to the coddling, let's-all-feel-good mind-set that has infected modern society and spoiled a generation, rewarding them with gold medals just for showing up.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't

Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation - into the meetings, postmortems, and "Braintrust" sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture - but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, "an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible."

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions

If you listen to nothing else on decision making, you should at least hear these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you and your organization make better choices and avoid common traps.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

Getting to Yes is a straightorward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting taken - and without getting angry. It offers a concise, step-by-step, proven strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict - whether it involves parents and children, neighbors, bosses and employees, customers or corporations, tenants or diplomats.

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

We've all had experience with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the ones around them and always need to be the smartest ones in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn't be this way. There is a formula for success that's been followed by the icons of history - from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs - a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.

Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be

In business, the right behaviors matter. But getting it right is tricky. Even when we acknowledge the need to change what we do and how we do it, life has a habit of getting in the way, upsetting even the best-laid plans. And just how do we manage those situations that can provoke even the most rational among us into behaving in ways we would rather forget?

The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over

The Like Switch is packed with all the tools you need for turning strangers into friends, whether you are on a sales call, a first date, or a job interview. As a Special Agent for the FBI's National Security Division's Behavioral Analysis Program, Dr. Jack Schafer developed dynamic and breakthrough strategies for profiling terrorists and detecting deception. Now, Dr. Schafer has evolved his proven-on-the-battlefield tactics for the day-to-day, but no less critical battle of getting people to like you.

Publisher's Summary

Chip and Dan Heath, the best-selling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.

Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?

In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively listenable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.

Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions such as these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?

Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful - and important - book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

The Heath Bothers, authors “Made to Stick” and “Switch” deliver their latest work on how to make better decisions. They offer four major reasons why decisions can run afoul. These include inappropriate problem framing, confirmation bias, and emotional interference and preparation for being wrong. They assert that a process will significantly improve your decision making skills. That is, process plus data improves the odds of a correct decision over data alone. As is their trademark, they come up with a pity pneumonic for their solution WRAP.

I thought the book was pretty good, it had the appropriate level of details and background stories. Earthshaking it was not. The concepts provide a framework for decision making similar to knife skills give you a framework for successful food preparation – without these things, outcomes will be unpredictable and vary. If you are looking for a Tour de Force in decision making, read “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. The Heath brothers even said as much in the initial chapter -- I totally agree.

Certainly, this book is easy to digest and if their advice is implemented, WRAP will lead to better decision making. It is a worthwhile listen but don’t expect shattering new insights. It is solid and worthwhile.

I think the book could have been better written. The solutions were made to fit the acronym WRAP (widen the options, reality test your assumptions, attain some distance, and prepare to be wrong). However, the book provides stories of good decisions and bad decisions that didn't fit neatly into one of those four steps. It is a good read for learning how to make better decisions. Unfortunately, it just wasn't structured well. It didn't have a good outline of the various approaches to good decision-making, which would have helped the listener in retaining the information.

The material in this book is extremely well-developed. I got more useful information out of the introduction than I usually get from an entire book. I listened to the introduction the first day and went away with knowledge that I could use the next day at work.

The topic structure is simple enough so that you can memorize the key points – important for material you plan to use on a daily basis. Yet the authors have compiled so much information and have so many real-life stories to back up each point, which helps the listener internalize them deeply. It is obvious that a lot of work and many years of effort have gone into this.

What about Kaleo Griffith’s performance did you like?

Kaleo Griffith’s performance has a way of making you feel like each new point is vitally important. It’s very subtle. I didn’t realize until half-way through the book that each time he was about to introduce a new topic, I found myself scrambling for something to write on. I didn’t want to miss anything! He definitely keeps the listener’s attention.

Any additional comments?

This is one of those books that will change the way you see the world.

More than half of us live our lives like we are in bumper cars. We just bouce from decision to decision like we are driving bumper cars in total darkness. Our choices will define us in the long-run and this book helps us understand ways to make better decisions. How we view our choices is a critical perspective. Decisive delivers a process to use when we are considering how to decide. The book and the recording will provide a positive impact for persons who are focused on making the best decisions and also provide a great service for those of us who have the awesome responsibilty of helping others make decisions in work and in life.

What other book might you compare Decisive to and why?

Read or listen to "18 Minutes" by Peter Bregman & "Made to Stick" & "Switch" by Dan and Chip Heath. "18 Minutes" is important. Bregman takes the point of view that we make definate decisions about how we spend our time."Made to Stick" and "Switch" make good companion reading because the principals they display and describe are valuable concerning how to view decisions. The principal of the elephant and the rider appy in "18 Minutes" and in "Decision".

Any additional comments?

I like to read the book on my Kindle (or hard copy) and listen at the same time. This gives me the 'see and the hear' at the same time. It keeps me on track and I enjoy the book best this way. This helps people like me stay focused.

The Heath brothers do an excellent job at walking you through the decision process and give you helpful and practical suggestions on ways to make decisions differently. The Brown M&Ms story was interesting and I have used it at work already.

One of the top audio's I have heard this year. So many great actionable advice on decision making provided in an engaging format. While it is hard to remember all of them you don't have to. They have the main points summarized on-line for those who purchase their audio. While I have heard bits and pieces of many of these ideas in other audio books this one brought the best ones together and was able to expand on them. If you enjoyed their previous work (Made to Stick or Switch) then you will not be disappointed by Decisive. Unlike many other authors each book is very different and they do not repeat themselves.

I recommended this book to a friend of mine who has trouble making decisions.

Have you listened to any of Kaleo Griffith’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I have not. I think I was generous giving the narration a 5 star review. It was 4 stars. He does not enhance the content of the book, but he represents it well and was easy to listen to.

Any additional comments?

If you make good decisions all the time, you'll have no use for this book. If you're like most of us humans, you should listen to it. It's very helpful without being preachy. It's very informative and educational without being dry. I'm a better decision maker for having listened to this book and I think anyone else could say the same after they listen to it or read it.